I am a historian of the British American colonies and the early United States. I enjoy teaching about US history, the early British Empire, and global histories of race and colonialism, and welcome students wishing to work with me in any of those fields. My research has primarily concerned the social and political ramifications of legal change in the long eighteenth century. I explore how ordinary people and oppressed or marginalized groups experienced the law especially in local contexts, how those experiences were mediated by local magistrates and other authorities, and how these localized practices were disrupted or complicated by the gradual proliferation of professionalized legal norms. I see this process--a protracted contest between 'low' and 'high' law over legitimacy and power--as deeply relevant to understanding early American state-building, constitutional politics, and race and class relations. Further, I seek to situate the American experience within a broader history of legal, constitutional, and social transformations intertwined with Anglo-American settler colonialism and 'herrenvolk' democracy.